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Last summer, the high-school English teacher T.J. Whitaker revised the reading list for his contemporary literature course with the addition of a new title— The Savage City , a gritty nonfiction account of race and murder in New York City in the 1960s. The 24-year teaching veteran said he chose the book to give his students at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, a chance to read “an honest depiction of the Black Panther Party and the corruption that existed in the NYPD during the...

This article is by Orly Morgan, board member AlterNATIVE Education, Columbia College Class of 2017. Summer is known as a time for students to rest and relax after months of classes; but for AlterNATIVE Education , summer means business. The team is quickly preparing to train facilitators, book flights and put the finishing touches on curriculum that it will teach to Native American students on 10 different reservation communities around the country AlterNATIVE Education is a not-for-profit...

The Boston Globe's spotlight team continues to do great reporting. In May, they ran a story about hundreds of students who had been sexually abused by staffers at close to 70 private schools in New England. Yesterday, they ran a story about the retaliation many faced at private schools after reporting. When a small boarding school in the Berkshires discovered that a music teacher was having a sexual relationship with a female student, administrators responded in a way many parents would...

A new report finds that children whose parents or caregivers misuse alcohol or have a substance abuse problem face an increased risk of medical and behavioral problems. The study calls for pediatricians to take an active role in assessing a child’s risk and to support the family to get the help they need. Experts have known that children whose parents or caregivers misuse alcohol or use, produce or distribute drugs face an increased risk of medical and behavioral problems. In the new...

In Evelyn Rebollar’s classroom, a student is listening to music on his phone while typing away on a laptop. Behind him, a classmate is fiddling with a deck of cards. One student is playing the computer game Age of Empires in the back corner. A couple tables away, one of his peers is chatting with another teacher in French. Rebollar is sitting at the front of the room, though the tables are arranged so most students aren’t facing her. The setup might seem strange: All of these students are in...

Steve Teles ranks among America’s leading academic experts on the application of conservative ideas to problems of governance. He chronicled the rise of the conservative legal movement in a 2010 book . This spring, he and co-author David Dagan have released a new study: Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration . Not a conservative himself, Teles writes as a sympathetic outsider, always looking for ways to bridge ideological gaps in the service of better policy. With...

Science and common sense don't always tell us the same things, so it's especially satisfying when they agree. In the case of children's exposure to violent media, the science clearly confirms what we already suspect: what children watch and play changes how they behave. Kids who experience more violence in their virtual worlds—television, movies, and video games—are more likely to display aggressive thoughts, aggressive behavior , and angry feelings in the real world. See the American...

About 15 years ago, non-profit and public service providers in Cowlitz County, Wash. were trying to figure out why—despite great planning and programming—there were still problems in the neighborhood that made the most 911 calls. The prevailing wisdom was that the neighborhood was dangerous because it was dark outside people’s homes, and it stayed dark because people liked it that way. It helped conceal criminal activity. But the coordinator for the service collaborative knew she needed to...

Housing assistance programs in the United States are falling far short of meeting a growing demand for aid in the years following the recession. My colleague Kriston Capps previously covered a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that found that federal rental assistance for families with children is at its lowest point in a decade , even as the number of very low-income families with children has increased by 53 percent in the same time frame. Rental assistance, broadly,...

For those looking to overcome an addiction to prescription painkillers or heroin , buprenorphine presents a relatively safe and proven option. Yet it’s rarely used: A new study estimates that, among Americans who used Medicare to pay for their prescriptions in 2013, about 80,000 had a script for buprenorphine, commonly known as Suboxone (one of the brand names). Meanwhile, the study’s authors estimate about 300,000 Medicare beneficiaries suffered from an opioid use disorder in 2013.

The lower part of South America, the Beijing region, and a little patch of far-east Russia: These were the landmasses that experienced abnormally cool temperatures in June. The vast majority of the Earth’s surface, however, was either warmer than usual or scalding with record-breaking heat , according to NOAA’s latest global analysis . At 1.6 degrees above the 20th-century average of roughly 60 degrees, it was the warmest June in modern history and the 14 th consecutive month of...

A humid afternoon in Philadelphia is an unforgiving time to mill around this prison yard. But here they are, of their own free will. Penned between the thick stone walls and brick towers — ominous battlements that evoke a medieval castle — more than a dozen tourists dressed in shorts and tank tops, capri pants and polos, wander across Eastern State Penitentiary’s baseball diamond with audio packs slung around their necks. A voice pipes through their headphones as they contemplate a 16-foot...